Honest truth? Kayoze Irani’s feature-film debut is not as unwatchable as what the reviews tell you. We are living in the era of pavlovian responses: if one critic likes a film blatantly ripped off from a Korean tearjerker, everyone else roars in approval.
It is like being hypnotized at a rock stadium. We will, we will… shock you! Sarzameen tries very hard to shock. And that is where it goes wrong. It tries too hard. You cannot have twists in the plot which make no sense just because they will make the audience gasp. It is like designating Kajol the killer in Gupt (no spoiler here, there’s no one out there who hasn’t seen Gupt).
I mention Kajol with a reason. She is the mother of a radicalized Kashmiri boy, who is married to an army officer named Vijay Menon, primarily to justify Prithviraj’s South Indian accent. Early in their “happily married” life, there are signs of friction as their speech-impaired son Harman (Ibrahim Ali Khan, playing one more specially abled character in this season of disabilities) feels neglected.
When Harman gets abducted (by Mihir Ahuja from The Archies, of all people!) Harman’s father, who has evidently seen Ramesh Sippy’s Shakti an unhealthy number of times, says, “Country above son”. Son comes back home after many years, radicalized, looking like Ibrahim Ali Khan, which is not such a bad thing.
Here I must admit the boy who plays the child Harman (Ronav Parihar) looks a lot like Ibrahim: same beak nose, same stammer. Who ‘nose’, they may be related!
Excuse me, I am digressing. That is something this film is never guilty of. As a matter of fact, the editing (by Nitin Baid) is so tight, the film feels like a dance in Elvis Presley’s skintight trousers. Sometimes I wished director Irani would give the characters and their melodramatic karma a chance to breathe.
But no, Sarzameen has the audience by its testicles (Elvis Presley’s trousers, remember?). The yearning to stop our attention from digressing is relentless. Lamentably, the film has neither the vision of Mani Ratnam’s Roja nor the visual vibrancy of Vinod Chopra’s Mission: Kashmir to make this explorative journey in Kashmir militancy interesting enough.
What I liked in Sarzameen is the theme of the radicalization of Kashmiri youngsters. How well do you know the son who sleeps in the next room and whom you take to school every day? This was the question asked in the jolting (but overrated) British series Adolescence.
Instead of running off in search of tawdry jumpscares, Sarzameen should have focussed on building on the troubled father-son relationship. Whatever there is of it, is impressively lit up by Prithviraj and Ibrahim.
Ibrahim has improved since we last saw him in Nadaniyaan. He still has a long way to go. But what is wrong with Kajol? She is just not there in her recent films, as if her mind was on something far removed from what she is doing on screen.
One remembers with much fondness Raakhee Gulzar’s quietly moving as the mother torn between her husband’s rigid sense of duty and her son’s resentful rebellion in Shakti.
But where is Kashmir? Although located in the Valley, the film chooses to remain indoors most of the time. Seen and evaluated in its own pulpy province, Sarzameen is not a totally dismissible experience.
